More miscellaneous Darja notes

These may or may not be of interest to anyone but myself; I'm posting them essentially so I don't forget them.

A couple of idioms:

• ər-riħ f-əš-šbək الريح في الشبك "wind in the net" - empty talk
• ʕla šufət əl-ʕin على شوفة العين "on the sight of the eye" - as far as the eye can see
• ṣufa ṭayṛa صوفة طايرة "a flying piece of wool" - flighty, capricious
• tɣiḍni ʕəmṛi تغيضني عمري "my life makes me feel pity" - I feel sorry for myself
• qʷʕədna ki ʕəbd waħəd قُعدنا كي عبْذ واحد "we stayed like one person" - we kept working together

And another proverb: əɣʷləq bab-ək ma txəwwən jaṛ-ək اغُلق بابك ما تخوّن جارك "Close your door and you won't make your neighbour a thief" - I guess you could loosely render this as "Good fences make good neighbours". Note that the corresponding verb xwən "steal" خْون forms a minimal pair with xun خون "betray", confirming that semivowels are distinct from the corresponding vowels.

As discussed earlier, the name of the town of Djinet is pronounced variously with a final t or d. As a convincing argument for the latter pronunciation being more correct (if the historical evidence hadn't been sufficient), someone pointed out to me that people from Djinet are called jnanda جناندة. The version with t presumably reflects Turkish influence as well as folk etymology.

fut فوت "pass" is used as a serial verb in a construction whose exact semantics I need to figure out better, typically in subordinate clauses: ila fətt šədditu إلا فتّ شدّيتهُ "once you've grasped it..."

Two interesting bits of maritime vocabulary are walyun واليون "apprentice not-yet-sailor who cleans the fishing boat in port" and ṛədfun ردفون "shrimp net". For the latter, I wonder if the first element might be Spanish red "net"; but I can't see what the fun would be in that case. For the former, I hardly even know how to find out what the translation into other languages around the Mediterranean might be. Suggestions for etymologies are welcome!

(Update thanks to jitaenow on Twitter: walyun is from Neapolitan guaglione, and is ultimately cognate with "galleon".)

Sticks and stones and value inversion

In the Western world over the past few years, freedom of speech seems to be becoming a matter not just of human rights but of cultural identity. While many threats to this principle are routinely ignored, some are singled out for a great deal of attention. In particular, legions of columnists stand firm against the efforts of ungrateful foreigners and degenerate youths – suicide bombers and special snowflakes – to undermine our liberal traditions. Such whiners, apparently, have forgotten one of the first proverbs an Anglo child learns:

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.

I am not aware of any close equivalent of this saying among the other cultures I know best; in that sense, it can indeed be seen as reflecting a distinctive characteristic of Anglo culture, if not necessarily Western culture. However, this saying is also much more recent than you might expect; its first appearance in print seems to be in mid-19th century America. This timing coincides well with the rise of classical liberalism, and its form seems to be a deliberate inversion of earlier proverbs, reversing the original meaning. Medieval Englishmen used to say precisely the opposite:

Malicious tongues, though they have no bones,
Are sharper than swords, sturdier than stones. (Skelton, Against Venemous Tongues, ed. Dyce, i. 134)

or:

Tongue breaketh bone, all if the tongue himself have none. (Wyclif, Works, ed. Arnold, ii. 44)

Rhyming proverbs to the same effect can be found all over northern Africa, in Algerian Arabic (of Oran):

əḷḷahumma ḍəṛba bdəmmha wala kəlma bsəmmha.
اللهم ضربة بدمها ولا كلمة بسمها.
O God, better a blow drawing blood than a word dripping poison.

or Kabyle Berber:

Ljerḥ yeqqaz iḥellu, yir awal yeqqaz irennu.
A wound digs deep and heals, a bad word digs deep and keeps digging.

or even Zarma (Songhay), down in Niger:

Yaaji me ga daray, amma sanni futo me si daray.
A lance’s edge goes away, but a bad word’s edge doesn’t go away.

Both contrasting sets of proverbs are, of course, gross exaggerations, false if taken literally. Words certainly can hurt, and wounds can certainly hurt worse than words; no one in any culture is likely to deny either fact. What they represent in each case is a cultural consensus – robust, but subject to change – on how seriously to take the hurt that words can cause, and by implication on how sharp a response is justified.

The most compelling by far of the classical liberal arguments for freedom of speech is that it deepens our understanding of the truth. An opinion left unchallenged starts to seem like intuitive common sense; it becomes something people adhere to out of habit rather than out of conviction. Freedom of speech, ironically, is a case in point. Ideally, we are exposed to the arguments for its value at some point, in university if not in high school. But long before that, we’ve already had a weak version of it inculcated by elements of everyday life, like “Sticks and stones...” Such an early exposure makes it seem like universal common sense, like something that should be instinctively obvious to everyone. It’s not; even Englishmen assumed the opposite not too long ago. If you want everyone to believe it, you have to be able to make a good argument for it – and to do that effectively, you need to understand something of where they’re coming from.

How does this compare with cultures you've lived? Are you familiar with any other proverbs on the relative harmfulness of words and weapons?

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Sources:

• Skeat, Walter W. 1910. Early English proverbs, chiefly of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with illustrative quotations. Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 133.
• Oran: Bakhti, Hayat. 2008. Approche thématique de l’injure dans le parler oranais. In ed. Aline Tauzin, Insultes, injures et vannes en France et au Maghreb. Paris: Karthala.
• Kabyle: Samia Khichane, unpublished presentation.
• Zarma: Bornand, Sandra. 2006. Parlons zarma, une langue de Niger. Paris: L’Harmattan, p. 108.

Tamazight (Berber) proverbs of Tipasa

The second part of the book I discussed in my previous post is more immediately relevant to linguists: it is a collection of more than 150 Tamazight proverbs from the Tipasa area (specifically the village of Bou-Smail). These are transcribed in Arabic characters and provided with an Arabic translation, along with an interpretation of the proverb's meaning and usage and translations of the meanings of (some) individual words.

The proverbs selected are often slightly mystifying, as so many proverbs are; but a lot of their themes will have a familiar air to any Algerian, even where the form is unique to the region. Accurately reflecting the mood of the first half of his book, he opens with the splendidly chauvinistic:

  يَازِيطْ نَتْسمُورثْ إينُو وَلاَ أسْكورْثْ أَمِدَنْ (Yaziṭ ntsmurṯ inu ula asekkurṯ n medden)
  Better a chicken from my land than a partridge from someone else's.

Another proverb which he brought a strong social spin to was:

  أغْيُولْ وَمَاسْ يَتْغِمَغْ بْلا لَحْلاَسْ (Aγyul umas yetγimeγ bla leḥlas)
  A jointly owned donkey remains saddle-less.

and

  أخَامْ وَمَاسْ يَتَوِدْ لَهْوَاسْ (Axxam umas yettawed lehwas)
  A jointly owned house brings problems.

both reflecting the beylik mentality that remains all too common in Algerians' treatment of public property, and helps explain why socialism could never have worked there.

Given the author's interest in emphasising the Amazigh element of Algerian culture even outside Tamazight-speaking areas, though, he missed a trick by not pointing out how a number of the proverbs are shared across Algeria. A couple of proverbs were familiar to me from Dellys, for example:

  أَعْدِيسْ سْحَالْ دْيَرْوَا، يَقَّارْ إيِخَف غَنَّى (Aɛdis sḥal d yeṛwa, yeqqar i yixef γenni)
  Dellys: كي تشبع الكرْش، تقول للرّاس غنّي (Ki təšbə` əlkərš, tqul ləṛṛaṣ γənni)
  When the stomach gets full, it tells the head to sing.

and:

  أُويْتُسْمغَرْ يَخَفْ، سَالْ أَيْشَابْ يَخَفْ (sic; U yettsumγer yixef, sal a ycab yixef)
  Dellys: ما يكبر راس حتّى يشيب راس (ma yəkbər ṛaṣ ħətta yšib ṛaṣ)
  No head grows up until another's head grows white.

Others are apparently used in Chaouia too:

  وَانِي أتْيَقْنَنْ سِفَسْنِيسْ، أَتْيَرْزَمْ سِغْمَاسِيسْ (wani a-t yeqqnen s ifassn-is, a-t yerzem s iγmasn-is)
  Chaoui: wi -t- ikersen s ufus , at yefdek s teψmas (ويت يكرسن سوفوس، أت يفدك ستغماس)
  Darja: اللي عقدها باليدين ، يحلها بالسنين (əlli `əqqədha bəlyəddin, yħəllha bəssnin)
  He who ties it with his hands will untie it with his teeth.

  يُوسَادْ جَرْ وَكْسُومْ أَذْيِشَرْ   (yusa-d jer weksum ḏ yicer)
  Chaoui: ittedef jer n yicher d w-aksum (يتّادف جر ن ييشر دوكسوم)
  Darja (as heard from Dahmane El Harrachi): داخل بين الضّفر واللّحم (daxəl bin əḍḍfəṛ wəllħəm)
  Coming between the fingernail and the flesh.

In a final appendix which is something of a grab-bag, he puts a table of pronouns (he leaves out "we"), a couple of poems in Latin and Arabic script (only the Latin has been hopelessly messed up by a font problem), a list of names with Tamazight etymologies, a story about the jackal and the hedgehog (to which I've seen parallels as far away as Ghomara in northern Morocco) in translation, and - rather bizarrely - a certificate from the Arabic Language and Literature Academy of Algiers that they've agreed to publish this book.

The one problem with the book is its transcription system (worsened by a number of typos even in the Arabic parts.) Plain Arabic is better suited than plain Latin for the transcription of Tamazight; but, unfortunately, he did not take the minor steps, such as inventing a letter for ẓ or writing all instance of a, i, u as long, that could have allowed a perfectly phonemic Arabic transcription (along the general lines of Mohamed Chafik's.) As a result, it ends up with almost as many ambiguities as the Latin system used by Laoust a century earlier. A curious feature of the transcription is the frequent absence of gemination (tashdid) where it would be expected; since he does transcribe some instances, and presumably would have no difficulty hearing it, this might reflect an actual feature of the dialect. More expected is the frequent weakening of feminine t- to h-, and often its complete disappearance.